Writing Underwater And An Urban Legend Bites The Dust: Pt. 1

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23846 – 1285

Dear Bloghoppers, Blogfrogs, Gentle Readers, and New and Old Followers,

Here’s the Haps:

First of all, let me tell you upfront that I don’t accept advertising on my site. One of several reasons I pay for my hosting is that I have seen a lot of instances where I can’t imagine the author of the post I just read endorsing such a thing as I just saw advertised. If you do some kind of advertising thing that works for you, good on you. I hope it works for you and you make a killing at it. You probably have many, many more followers than I do, and are much more consistent than I am in scheduling your posts, so you are likely to get more clicks, anyway. Very nice. I never started my website or this blog with the intention of making money. They were and are exercises. Several years ago, now, I did try doing a Pay Per Post type of thing where you pick a product and write about it and make so much per word but there were so few products to choose from and fewer still that I could think of anything to say about that I just gave up on that.

I said all that just to say that this post is not an advertisement but just something I think is cool and contains something that I have always wanted to try, ever since I was a boy, actually.

For many years, even long before the Internet was a thing and there were only three big TV channels and a couple of UFO stations (Oops. That should be UHF, but autocorrect didn’t catch it.), An Urban Legend existed that was commonly believed, and there was no real way for an ordinary person, especially a kid, to prove or disprove it. You believed such things based on the merit of the person who told it to you. There are still a lot of them out there, but I am going to do my best to dispel this one, at least.

The legend (which sometimes starts out titled, “Your Taxes At Work”) has it that:

NASA spent millions of dollars (it started out as hundreds of thousands of dollars but over time it has grown, probably to billions by now, I expect.) developing an ‘astronaut pen’ that would work in outer space, while the Soviets fixed the problem much more cheaply and quickly by using pencils.

Both NASA and the Soviet space programs used pencils even though there were several inherent dangers in using them. Graphite is conductive, and a tiny piece of broken-off pencil lead or even graphite dust from writing, floating around in zero gravity, was a danger to sensitive electronic equipment and to astronauts and cosmonauts as well. In a highly concentrated oxygen-rich atmosphere, wooden pencils and shavings would be combustible as well. Soviet cosmonauts used pencils or grease pencils on plastic slates. The idea of anything flammable was forbidden after the horror of Apollo 1.

But a man named Paul Fisher, an inventor and the founder of Fisher Pens, was already working on developing a pen that would write under many conditions and in any environment. NASA was looking for something like this, but had not spent any money on research and development of such a product. Fisher had created a working pressurized refill by 1965 and approached NASA, they were interested and agreed to test the pen. Paul Fisher spent around a million dollars of his own money to develop this pen, and by 1967, NASA tested it in the most extreme conditions they could imagine or might need.

The pressurized refill with a special, patented ink made it so the pen could write at any angle and in pretty much any condition. -30°F to +250°F (-35°F to +121°C) temperatures, underwater, over grease, and in the vacuum of outer space. They have 3 miles of ink, which has a flash point of +392°F (+200°C) and a shelf life of 100 years. It has met and exceeded more exacting standards than even the Skilcraft I told you about a while back, which the government already had (still has) on contract. By November of 1967, they had reached an agreement, and NASA ordered 400 pens at $2.95 each for a whopping grand total of $1,180.

In 1968, it went into outer space on the Apollo 7 mission, and in 1969, the Soviet Union bought 100 of the pens.

So, this one sale was not going to make back Mr. Fisher’s investment of time and money. But the rigorous testing done by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration provided the reputation and selling points needed. Now it’s used by outdoor workers, oil rig employees, and a veritable plethora of other folks.

And yet, the question remains: Does it really work?

Come back tomorrow for part 2, when I test the pen myself.